Why don't they get Boeing to do it? Sure, it might have a few glitches when they get it done, but it would save them some money and create a whole bunch of jobs for foreign workers.

You could outsource it strait to china if that's the plan. Who needs Boeing?The engine was already designed and proven reliable. Apollo failed on mass production.

Setup a factory and crank those biatches out./I've read estimates that Apollo cost somewhere between three hundred and five hundred million per flight./compared to the shuttle at around seven hundred million./going to the moon on ISS money certainly sounds like a better deal.

+1. We chickened out on having the star system explored by now and getting a city (a complete city) up to Mars in our lifetimes. Budget 5,000 life insurance policies and raffle 'em out to scaredy cats like a certain guy here on FARK, and let's get off this rock once and for all. We chickened out, all for the "sake" of 5,000 idiots who are all dead now anyway and who probably died of cancer anyway.

/medievalist arseholes//I could be on Saturn///My slashies could be on Uranus!

My almost 70 year old Uncle (who was fresh out of school during Apollo 11 and worked on Skylab, the original TDRS birds and what of SDI NASA actually started working on) returned to NASA after 25-some odd years in the private sector because they didn't have anyone to teach the new guard how to work with this technology.

Ok, I just watched Iron Sky the other night, and, aside from the OBVIOUS inaccuracies, the scene where the Earth ships all gang up on the Nazis made me wonder - does anybody else actually have a space ship they could put in orbit right now, besides us and Russia?

+1. We chickened out on having the star system explored by now and getting a city (a complete city) up to Mars in our lifetimes. Budget 5,000 life insurance policies and raffle 'em out to scaredy cats like a certain guy here on FARK, and let's get off this rock once and for all. We chickened out, all for the "sake" of 5,000 idiots who are all dead now anyway and who probably died of cancer anyway.

/medievalist arseholes//I could be on Saturn///My slashies could be on Uranus!

And you'd be dead or dying from radiation related causes by the time you got to Uranus.Manned exploration of the solar system beyond the moon is on permanent hold until we can find some way to combat or negate the rather extreme radioactive environment that is space. As is, NASA has put a hard one-year cap on any mission that would go beyond the shielding effect of earths magnetic field.

phyrkrakr:Ok, I just watched Iron Sky the other night, and, aside from the OBVIOUS inaccuracies, the scene where the Earth ships all gang up on the Nazis made me wonder - does anybody else actually have a space ship they could put in orbit right now, besides us and Russia?

china i believe could punt one up in short notice, they've got a nice soyuz-derivative.

willing to put money on the ESA being able to get something up there in a hurry if they had to, dust off some prototype or just bolt some seats into their cargo-carrier.

phyrkrakr:Ok, I just watched Iron Sky the other night, and, aside from the OBVIOUS inaccuracies, the scene where the Earth ships all gang up on the Nazis made me wonder - does anybody else actually have a space ship they could put in orbit right now, besides us and Russia?

Archie Goodwin:phyrkrakr: Ok, I just watched Iron Sky the other night, and, aside from the OBVIOUS inaccuracies, the scene where the Earth ships all gang up on the Nazis made me wonder - does anybody else actually have a space ship they could put in orbit right now, besides us and Russia?

China? But that would be it, I think.

We don't have one, not counting spacex's dragon capsule. Far as I understand the shuttle engines have been removed and the pad decommissioned. So its as easy to get an orbiter into orbit as it would be to launch a Saturn series rocket.

msupf: Manned exploration of the solar system beyond the moon is on permanent hold until we can find some way to combat or negate the rather extreme radioactive environment that is space.

3-5 ft of water around the living space would be enough. I'll leave it to others to figure out how to either drag that much water into orbit, or get it from another source (comets? excess LH2 and LOX combined non-explosively?).

buttery_shame_cave:phyrkrakr: Ok, I just watched Iron Sky the other night, and, aside from the OBVIOUS inaccuracies, the scene where the Earth ships all gang up on the Nazis made me wonder - does anybody else actually have a space ship they could put in orbit right now, besides us and Russia?

china i believe could punt one up in short notice, they've got a nice soyuz-derivative.

willing to put money on the ESA being able to get something up there in a hurry if they had to, dust off some prototype or just bolt some seats into their cargo-carrier.

ESA did design the ATV with an eye to man-rating it, but whether or not the will do so, I don't know.

I remember reading once that most of the tech for the Apollo rockets is lost because they were stored on outdated magnetic tapes that, even if they were still viable, didn't have reliable systems that could read them, so reverse engineering them is pretty much the only way to go. It kills me that so many millions of hours of work from the nation's best and brightest at the time have been lost. It's like someone discovering the wheel, but then forgetting to draw the basic shape so others could build it, too.

I remember reading once that most of the tech for the Apollo rockets is lost because they were stored on outdated magnetic tapes that, even if they were still viable, didn't have reliable systems that could read them, so reverse engineering them is pretty much the only way to go. It kills me that so many millions of hours of work from the nation's best and brightest at the time have been lost. It's like someone discovering the wheel, but then forgetting to draw the basic shape so others could build it, too.

NASA got rid of the plans when it was realized that with the FOIA, people would do analysis on the Saturn V that would prove beyond any doubt that the moon landings were a hoax. Look, we've got plans for the Write Flyer. We've got plans for the Titanic. Nobody loses that stuff. You're telling me we "lost the plans" for the *moon rocket*?

Jim DiGriz:msupf: Manned exploration of the solar system beyond the moon is on permanent hold until we can find some way to combat or negate the rather extreme radioactive environment that is space.

3-5 ft of water around the living space would be enough. I'll leave it to others to figure out how to either drag that much water into orbit, or get it from another source (comets? excess LH2 and LOX combined non-explosively?).

Be nice to figger out how to get it into orbit as ice and not liquid water.

Kittypie070:Jim DiGriz: msupf: Manned exploration of the solar system beyond the moon is on permanent hold until we can find some way to combat or negate the rather extreme radioactive environment that is space.

3-5 ft of water around the living space would be enough. I'll leave it to others to figure out how to either drag that much water into orbit, or get it from another source (comets? excess LH2 and LOX combined non-explosively?).

Be nice to figger out how to get it into orbit as ice and not liquid water.

/just thinking out loud, and not too seriously

send it up frozen and keep it shady till you need to use it.

no, you can't use ice to make a spaceship. not for inner-system work. you'd have to be out past mars for that to be viable.